ABSTRACT
Avtar Brah (1996: 193), a leading diaspora theorist, asks ‘When does a location become home? What is the difference between “feeling at home” and staking claim to a place as one’s own?’ Many existing studies on diaspora have focused on their ambivalent sense of belonging to the receiving society and the concrete or symbolic connections that they forge and maintain with their ancestral homeland, as well as the transnational processes through which diasporic groups shape their identities or, as Clifford (1997) puts it, their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. The theme’s popularity is unsurprising, considering that the term ‘diaspora’ refers to those who have left or have been forced to leave their homeland in the ‘centre’ and dispersed to ‘peripheral’ locations (Cohen 1997; Safran 1991).
